I have read quite a few longevity research paper on HN alone. Is there anything we can put to use other than common sense (no smoke, alcohol, etc)?
For more detail, Peter Attia's new book 'Outlive' is a good introduction to some of the more involved steps you can take (wear a CGM to fine tune your diet for metabolic health, do more exercise and target it more specifically).
Attia does have some recommendations on protein (eat a lot, eat meat) that conflict with other longevity researchers' suggestions ( https://www.valterlongo.com/daily-longevity-diet-for-adults/ ) so take that with a pinch of (metaphorical) salt.
Also, normal people (entirely correctly) call table sugar a carbohydrate. Why nerd snipe?
Also, that might be a distinction without a difference in most cases, but sucrose and fructose also may not produce identical glycemic response to simple carbohydrates.
The point is this is a very complex topic, and some of it is at the edge of what humans know about nutrition.
Do you think I should be aiming for more sleep?
When you feel tired, it means you are very tired right now.
People who are sleep deprived and rate themselves as not tired shows poorer intellectual performance in tests.
Of course this is subject to perturbation by complicating factors like hungry cats.
Lots of my family members are in their late 80's now and I really wouldn't want to exchange say a decade of their life with a decade of mine if that means I will only live to 75 instead of 85 or 90. The number of people in their 80's that I know that I would want to exchange with is vanishingly small, most of them are going from one health issue to another, whereas most people in their 70's that I know, even the ones that lived relatively unhealthy are still going quite strong.
I get that that is what you are saying is a part of the quality of sleep experience, but those qualities are not really about duration, you either have those privileges or you don't. If you are lucky enough to have a biological clock requiring less hours per night to enjoy them fully, that's ok.
I would agree though that to forgo those qualities intentionally over an extended timeframe is a curious choice.
I think some people, specially nowadays, live in a very conceptual world inside their minds, and anything that they don't understand or deem unrelated to it, they compartmentalize as disposable, where in reality they're being a bit childish in how narrow they view the world.
I find that the 16 hours I have after clocking 8 hours are infinitely more "awake" than the 19 hours I get when I only clock 5.
Which is basically what the sleep researchers say. The bottom line is that there's clearly a tipping point, not the same for everyone of course but averaging around 7 hours, below which "wakefulness" (and functioning metabolism in general) experienced throughout the rest of the day rapidly starts to tank.
It's a bit tough for me at the moment as I WFH and $wifie is horrified by the idea of fasting, but well if I don't get fired over next two weeks I'll start going into the office.
I do a water fast on thursdays (~36 hrs). I find that to be much easier than intermittent fasting mentally somehow.
Will they just stop happening after awhile?
The experiments showing longevity benefits from extreme caloric restriction have been conducted with small animals living in safe lab environments where they are protected from injuries and infectious diseases. Out in the real world, sarcopenia is a real killer. Elderly people need adequate (but not excessive) caloric intake in order to maintain muscle strength and prevent falls.
Temporary fasting for a few days likely has some benefits, at least for younger people with good lean muscle mass. But that's different from what people usually refer to as caloric restriction.
I'm actually taking plain Nicotinamide (one form of Vitamin B3) in larger amounts (3g/day) and the benefits I feel from it are similar to those ascribed to NMN (the recommended dose of which is about 1g/day).
Admittedly, I got put on it because my blood work wasn't going in the right direction, but it has noticably increased my ability to lose weight. Not exactly scientific, but in my first 5 months of trying to lose, I was down 30 pounds, in the next 5 months after starting it, I lost about 50 and was less strict about my diet. I was even doing less cardio because I had primary shifted to lifting weights.
Now I'm down a full 100 pounds, admittedly with another ~100 to lose, but I really can't describe how much better I feel. Combine that with moving to have a regular social life, I feel like my life is headed in the right direction for the first time since college.